of gravel and other materials as insulation.
By many accounts, builders of the BAM
didn't have the time to do their job right. They
had a preordained schedule, and Brezhnev
wouldn't hear of delays. "The track was laid,
the completion reports were written," said
one official. And then track bed sank in the ice
melt. Rails twisted, tunnel walls collapsed.
Repairs and detours threw the BAM five years
behind schedule.
T HE BAM was expected to open new
areas for exploitation, for timber and
copper, but there is just one payoff
now. That's at Neryungri, 900 miles
northeast of Irkutsk. Its buildings, gleaming
white, are a strange sight in the spruce and fir
of the taiga.
Only 15 years old and already the home of
120,000, Neryungri is on a north-aimed rail
spur, the Little BAM. It's there because of
coal, scooped from a three-mile-long open pit.
Japan invested three billion dollars in this
mine and receives five million tons of coking
coal a year, about half the production.
Nikolai Ivanov has invested five years of his
life here and gets about 1,500 rubles a month. I
met him at the end of a shift. Churning mud,
drivers wheeled into a squishy parking area in
giant U. S.-made Lectra Haul and Soviet
BelAz trucks that carry 180 tons each, and
120-ton Japanese Komatsus. It seemed like a
gathering of elephants.
A rope of a man, Nikolai was lured by the
money-three times what he earned in Sverd
lovsk in the Urals. Like many here, he's saving
to buy a car and a better flat back home.
That's about all you can hope for in Neryun
gri. Never have I seen citizens with so many
things to be angry about. I was at the train
depot when shrieking passengers mobbed
poor stationmaster Viktor Grachev; the
public-address system had announced yet
another delay of the mainland-bound train,
already three hours tardy.
The city's central heating plant was down,
which meant no hot water in flats. (Thank
goodness it was summer.) Beside a shack made
from packing crates, a nine-year veteran of
Neryungri said bitterly: "I was deceived. The
promises of good living conditions were never
fulfilled." Hot water? He doesn't even have
cold water in his shack.
It's another BIOB; Brezhnev insisted on
industry first, social needs later.
Then we have the angry Evenk, one of Sibe
ria's 30 indigenous groups. Numbering 4,000
in this region, the Evenk watched develop
ment gobble up their reindeer pastures while
wastes poisoned streams and poachers killed
their animals.
"We must fight," declared
young Valentin Alekseev. Indeed, the Evenk
have complained all the way to Moscow. At
least, Valentin said, "No one is closing doors
to us like they used to."
Long summer days of Siberia's northern lati
tudes attract sunbathers to a beach on the Ob
River near Novosibirsk. After the dark and
bone-chilling winter ends, Siberians relish
their all-too-brief stretch of warm weather,
taking to the outdoors for camping, boating,
fishing, and barbecues.